148 EYE SPY 



face of an ordinary cocoon when you will. True, 

 there are some cocoons into whose silk meshes 

 the caterpillar weaves the hair of its body, but the 

 felt thus formed is only a shell, and is intermeshed 

 with silken webs, and one pinch alone will open 

 up the hollow interior and show us the caterpillar 

 or chrysalis within. Such, for instance, is the lit- 

 tle brown winter snuggery of the woolly -bear 

 caterpillar which we all know, and whose prickly 

 cocoons may be found beneath stones and logs in 

 the fields. 



But what do we find in these cocoons that we 

 now have before us ? Not only is there no ves- 

 tige of silk to be seen, but there are hairs enough 

 in this single cocoon to have supplied a hun- 

 dred caterpillars, while we look in vain for any 

 sign of the spinner within. Indeed, there is no 

 within ; pinch after pinch reveals nothing but the 

 same gray felt. We are now a quarter of an 

 inch below the surface, when another pinch brings 

 with it a small mass of white specks like crumbs 

 intermingled with the hair, and in the hollow thus 

 deepened we observe a shiny white object like 

 ivory, with a minute ball at its tip. It certainly 

 looks like a tiny bone. We impatiently break 

 open the cocoon, when we see in truth a bone — 

 indeed, a compact mass of bones from some very 

 small animal, whose identity we may guess from 

 the mouse-color of the felt. Here is the femur of 



